"Come, let us take counsel against them in these matters, to diminish them that they multiply not, so as that, should war be arrayed against us, they be not added to our adversaries, and destroy us that not one of us be left, and they afterward go forth from the land."
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (1:10) preserves Pharaoh's speech with a small, chilling addition: in these matters. The counsel is not a single decree but a whole menu of cruelty. Demographics. Labor quotas. Fear. The tyrant is already picking tools.
Notice the logic. Pharaoh does not say "let us drive them out." That would acknowledge them as a nation. He says let us diminish them. Less food. Less rest. Less hope. The goal is not death but attrition — to shrink a people until their strength drops below the threshold at which their numbers would matter.
And the reason? A hypothetical war. An enemy that does not yet exist. A defection that may never happen. Pharaoh is terrified of a future his own mind is generating. Ancient sages reading this verse heard the echo of Haman and every paranoid regime that would follow: the tyrant is always fighting ghosts.
The Targum's final clause — "and they afterward go forth from the land" — is almost a slip of the tongue. Pharaoh fears Israel might leave. He wants them enslaved and present, not free and gone. A tyrant does not only want to harm you. He wants to keep you close enough to harm again.
The takeaway: hatred that fears your departure is not hatred alone. It is possession dressed in hatred's clothes.